


Soft Webs

by HardingHightown



Series: Blue Eyes, Warm Heart (Watcher Meroia) [1]
Category: Pillars of Eternity
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-14
Updated: 2020-08-14
Packaged: 2021-03-06 04:48:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,609
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25887607
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/HardingHightown/pseuds/HardingHightown
Summary: Her father had told her before they took her from old Vailia, “There is no good life for a Cipher Meroia, especially one of our blood in their lands. They do not understand the old way, they only understand what they can get from you. They will never trust you. Be careful, aimora.”
Relationships: Thaos ix Arkannon/Eydis Webb
Series: Blue Eyes, Warm Heart (Watcher Meroia) [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1729900
Comments: 2
Kudos: 2





	Soft Webs

Before, life was simple. That was true. Life was expected and simple. In the mornings she would wake and take breakfast with the mistress, sweet orange jams with butter and bread and hot syrupy tea. Then they would choose their outfits for the day, a decision that took the woman at least an hour. Then walking, around the grounds and to the crypt and back again, then the mistress would take a nap and she would slip from her grasp and into the rest of the house, visiting the other servants in the kitchens and the parlour. The heat was time for the nobles to rest, but time for the serving classes to sweat over laundry and hearth-scrubbing, or cut up fruits for the Mistress when she woke, or feed the pigs.

Most days she would help them with their load. The kitchen was the easiest, her deft fingers making quick work of the detailed nature of carving up an apple into a rosette, but Chef Elona found some of her blue fur on the edge of the dishes one too many times and told her she feared for what the mistress might do if she knew her favourite was in the kitchens. So she changed her focus to helping the youngest of the house, the scullery children scrubbing the floors and trying to chase the shadows to stay cool, or the milkmaids with the goats, or the laundresses hanging out the linens like great sails. She would read them softly, looking for their pain and easing it with a kind word, a small task or a coin or two that her master wouldn’t miss.

She remembered the first time she took her master’s dagger from his belt, having looked through his coats for change he wouldn’t miss. He had left it carelessly in the corner of the room when he returned from a particularly long journey, turning her out from her mistresses bed into the anti-room outside with little ceremony. It was a beautiful item for a base man, yet another symbol of wealth that was unnecessary and thoughtless. She had felt the carving of Ondra under her fingers and realised they were beginning to get calloused, which would not do. She asked Amina to fetch her a cream she had seen on the mistresses vanity for softness and paid the woman double for it. It probably cost her another ten months in the house, she realised with a heavy feeling in her gut, but the young ones sneaked her fresh cheese and gave her trinkets they found discarded after salons, and more importantly smiled at her when they saw her, so it was worth enough.

The smiles were not forthcoming in the Dyrwood.

An acre of land and a chance, the chance to fall in love and bear children of her own, that was all she had wanted from this cold and dark country, but the Awakening had taken all the dreams of that away from her. All that was left in the Dyrwood was cold purple light, the feeling of something being drawn out of the front of her skull and through her nose. A crumbling ruin and crumbling roads, children born without souls and soil where oranges would not grow. A place where she carried her own dagger, one she ran her fingers over time and time again as if the carving of Ondra were still under her fingers, a place where she let her fingers grow calloused and her fur grow dull with dirt. The gift of being a Watcher meant that she could see so much more of the people around her, and yet all it did was make her feel further from them. All she felt was alone, until Lady Webb had sent her letter.

Her father had told her before they took her from old Vailia, “There is no good life for a Cipher Meroia, especially one of our blood in their lands. They do not understand the old way, they only understand what they can get from you. They will never trust you. Be careful, aimora.” 

She had shrugged off his concerns then. Her servitude to the mistress came with the promise of study in Selona and a place to stay in exchange for servitude to the house, a more exciting place than the old cities, full of studious animancy and art and more. The contract had been made for five years, two of study, two to work off the debt and one the debt of travel. But the university would not take her, her mistress would not fight for her place, and three years turned to five years turned to ten. She could have kept a life there, simple and small, but it was not enough.

Now she had her freedom from her debt, and with it had given up all thoughts of training her skills until she had stepped into the walls of Hadret House. The invitation sat in her pack for weeks before she ventured over there, busy with things at the keep, something she now felt sit on her chest. She could have had two more weeks with them, in the welcoming embrace of Dunryd Row.

Lady Webb reminded her of the mistress in some ways, a bearing that marked her as noble, a way of holding a letter, of sitting on the very corner of the chair with a long straight spine. Unlike her sweet plump mistress, Lady Webb was old and spindled and sharp, flooding Meroia’s mind with colour as she reached out. Where sharing the mind of the Grieving Mother felt soft, hazy and grey, Lady Webb, Eydis, filled her mind with the sharpest colours, swirling thoughts that cleared up her mind, the feeling of the sun beating down in high summer in the old country.

Her father had told her there was no life for her sort, but here were dozens of Orlans like her, practicing their craft for the betterment of those around them, under the hands of a mistress who cared for them like a mother. The smiling face of Kurren, his warm voice calling her over as the others stayed back at the tavern, being able to pick and at cases with him over candlelight. The feeling that here she was useful, that she was connected, that she was known.

There is no good life for a Cipher, her father had said, and for a while at least they had proved him wrong.

Then the world was on fire.

Her first thoughts were of Eydis from the moment the Animancer’s body became twisted and taught in the hearings, but she knew it was too late to reach her now. Thaos had come for her. She knew that the centuries Lady Webb had waited were over, and that all the work was at an end. Below the fear of knowing their bond, Meroia had been thrilled by the romance of it, the idea of a love that spanned decades, of finding somebody who truly wasn’t known to anybody and gave more to you than anybody else, who understood you more than you understood yourself, who sparked that devotion, that love. She had thought of how they might be reunited often, fanciful in her hope that maybe he would come to her and leave his devotion, that this nightmare would be undone by love. Eydis left the last moments for her to see, pushing Thaos to speak, and the sadness of it balled up in her stomach and spread ice through her. There was no great passion to conquer the heavy thud of duty, of the path chosen, of the destiny unavoidable. There was nothing more than the slit throat Eydis had been waiting for, glassy eyed and laid out on a bed of her own making.

The room fell back into an amber glow as the vision left her, the only sound the roar of the flames and the scream of the crowds outside. Aloth pushed her to leave, his delicate fingers soft on her shoulder, but she would not go until, shaking, she had drunk every last sip from the glass the Lady had left for her, the one thing she had denied Thaos.

And then, on the bridge out of Defiance Bay, the flames licking the night sky behind them as they ran from the city walls, Aloth had called out to her and told her his secret. Why he was here, why he had followed her, why he stayed. He told her, moments after she had watched Thaos kill Eydis, that he was here for the Leaden Key.

She wanted to be angry. She wanted that passion to rise in her. She wanted to feel betrayed, that was the right feeling wasn’t it? She wanted the shock to lead her to scream at him, to plunge her mind into his and tear him apart from the inside. She wondered why she had never probed at his conscious, why she had never felt to read him, to see his heart, to push against a mind that was closed to her. She thought of holding his hand in the Sanitarium, of telling him it would all be okay. She looked at him now, visibly shaking under the flickering flames, and felt no anger, just a dull ache of pity, a wash of memories of pledging herself to a mistress that did not deserve her loyalty, of comfort in the embrace of somebody who gave security at a cost.

She told him to look for no masters again, and made the promise to herself that she would do the same.


End file.
